We were hired to take out a witness against company A who was currently being held by rival company B, both of whom were in the chemical processing business.

Despite several comments by the GM ...

The Troll who carried around a Panther assault cannon was caught on video. He decided not to even bother with a mask.

The evil mage ™ left his signature of several high force spells in the facility.

Any takers on how long these characters will live?

As it is, my character (the third and final runner of the group who took the job) decided that living was the best decision and is skipping out of country, preferably to somewhere that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the UCAS for several months. And even then, I'm not quite sure how long she's going to live.

I give the Troll a few short days.
unless he goes to ground int he middle of the barrens, then I give him a fortnight.

The Mage, I give a week, unless he initiates and changes his signature.

Issue with traveling to a foreign nation, you aren't local/native. You stick out like a sore thumb, and if Company A has a presence in that nation (and if they are worth pulling a run against, they probably do) no lack of an extradition treaty will save you from them.

Maybe you should look for a country that doesn't have either of the corporations you were "against" and a people that don't care about anyone that doesn't bother them.

Find a nice hole and settle down for a good long time. Chances are good it'll become your favorite place of living.

Indeed. It also depends on just how long it took before any discovery of the run was found. And how quick magicians were sent to see if magic was used.

As far as the troll, he could always look for another troll that looks similar, and pass the panther off to him, and try and have him take the fall.

Yeah, would work. As we know all troll look the same.

Honestly, i don't think that idea would work.

A troll might think so though. They aren't exactly the sharpest tools around

PC throws an Incendiary grenade at Target.

Target moves, so PC attempts to fetch the grenade.

Grenade detonates (duh!).

PC in question is also carrying 5 additional grenades and about 10kg of C-12.

PC begs the GM to invoke "Hand-of-God".

The End.

A character with a Lauch Weapons skill of one using a grenade launcher in a sewer.

It's now known among my group as "The day pythagoras saved my characters life"

Players facing off against a damaged, 4-meter tall mech-type drone, with a "very large barrelled gun that's almost as big as the 2-meter arm it is mounted on."

Mech shoots at Phys Adept elf who has no cyber armor, wearing only FFBA and a Secure Jacket.

GM asks, "Are you going to use most, or all of your combat dice to dodge with"?

Elf says, "I'll Soak"

The Mech only had one success. Elf used entire combat pool, body, and 3 Karma rerolling failures to stage an 18D down to Serious.

Elf, "But you didn't say it was an Assault Cannon!"

GM - "And now for its *second* action..."

I do want to point out that gunnery is always a Complex Action

~J

I'll agree... Troll is in danger of being Toasted, the Mage is marginally safe, and the third member of the party should be fine. (unless they forgot to wear thier mask).

So, this was back when Virtual Seattle was still kicking...

I'm at a gameday in a local shop and I'm there for a VS/Shadowrun event. I've got a starting character that I'm comfortable with and there are several people at the table that I don't know, a couple I do, and a GM that I knew fairly well. The GM was pretty old school, let the dice fall where they may, and I and many other people at the table respected that. So we get hit with the standard box text these events are generally known for... Apparently, all of are characters associate with one another on our down time (plot railroad) and before we head into the local "runner bar" we all see a visibly pregnant elven woman being dragged into the shadows of a deep, dark alley by two goons in Light Security armor. After a general WTF?!?, we all go galloping after this scene and soon find ourselves in a hostage situation. The armored goons that we confront are now threatening to kill the woman in question if we don't let them leave with her. So people start blurting out ideas, trying to negotiate and then one of the people I had never met blurts out, "Has anyone seen Speed? There was confusion at the table but the GM goes "Uhhh, yeah... So what?" At this point, random new guy blurts out, "I SHOOT THE HOSTAGE! I SHOOT THE HOSTAGE! I shoot the hostage in the shoulder so that they'll drop her and then I shoot the guy that was holding her..." Now that brought everything to a halt. The GM says "I don't think that is such a great idea..." And so this guy cops 'tude and says "No, no... That's what I'm doing. Just like in Speed." So the guy ends up shooting a pregnant elf lady, a "pedestrian" level character, with a Heavy Pistol. The Hostage had no access to her dodge pool and a body of 2. She did the only thing she could do. She died. The goons drop her and sprint away, easily dodging the rest of the group's parting shots, and disappear. We found out after the game (2 minutes later) that they were Tir Ghosts trying to pick up a runaway daughter from one of the noble houses... I'm pretty sure I would have hated the adventure on its own merits from that point on but since the person we were supposed to recover LATER in the adventure was killed, there was no point in going on. One of the worst things I ever witnessed in SR.

I object to conscription the way a lobster objects to boiling water: it may be his finest hour but it's not his choice.

nah, just a random "Thout of the day" kinda post.

Group of PCs doing a recon on a medical clinic before doing an extraction on one of the top notch surgeons working there. A couple of hundred feet away from the clinic lies a building hidden by a 20 foot wall. The mage decides he wants to know what is on the other side, for no apparent reason. It was a game rather on the fly, and I had made up the surroundings as we played, and didn't have any second thoughts about placing a building with a big wall because it was the last one and I was just a little out of inspiration at the moment. The mage's only useful spell in that situation is Levitate, and rather than asking the PhysAd who's an outdoor freak and who loves to climb to check it out while under an Invisibility spell, the mage decides to cast both on himself right away. He fumbled both spells. Even before we stop laughing and before I tell him the results of the fumbles, he announces and rolls right away a second time both spells. Once again, he fumbled both tests. He didn't laugh. The rest of us did. For 15 minutes at least. Then I announced to him that he was able to levitate to the top of the wall, but due to blood loss and shock, he wasn't able to see what was on the other side, since his legs had stayed on the pavement below. Then we laughed another 15 minutes. Finally, even though the clinic wasn't far away, his character didn't make it, but the rest of the team used that opportunity to extract the surgeon.

I might have been a little cruel, but I believed at the time that he did deserve it.

Boiled down to the barest facts, I once had a PC attempt to consume a power source larger than his head.*

It didn't end well.

*If you haven't read the 'If I was an Evil Overlord' list, you are a sadly unenlightened person.

I've posted this one before, but it's been a while. This one was submitted to the CLUE files, it's so distressing.

I'm GMing again, and the mission is to take out a heavily-secured facility. Now, they're getting paid to cause heavy damage and carnage, so they go in packing heavy, knowing the opposition will be just as well-armed. Since they need to raze the place, they even brought satchel charges; research has revealed the walls are all heavily reinforced, so extras are packed.

Things are rough, but they're still going well, up until this point, when the oppostion barricaded a hallway.

Let me skip ahead to the punchline:

Me: (to mage) Let me get this straight. You're in a two-meter wide, ten-meter long hallway. The barricade is about 7 meters in front of you. You're sustaining a Levitate Self and Improved Invisibility spell, you have a moderate Physical and a Serious Stun wound, lighting is bad and you have no vision enhancements, and you want to fly over the barricade, and throw a grenade?

And it only gets better from there:

Mage: That's right. I got a frag left, it'll mess them up.

Me: *pause* Ohhhhkay. You're only dropping it, so I'll go against base TN of 2....(calculated modifiers) Target number 17. You do have Thrown Weapon, don't you?

Mage: Yup. Lessee... I got it at one.

Everyone: *pause*

Me: Are you really sure about this?

Mage: Yup. I'll drop it, and fly right past. I can spare one from my combat pool.

Me: Ohhhhkay.

Mage (rolls): oh.

Sammie: What??

Mage: I rolled all ones.

Sammie: Spend some karma pool, doofus!

Mage: I'm out of Karma pool. I spent it to resist drain.

Me: Well then. (I start pantomiming) You grasp the grenade in your left hand, pull the pin, and throw. An object goes flying. Then you look down at your left hand, and have a second to yelp.

Surprisingly enough, the mage managed to survive this; the sammie, some distance away, did so as well.

Three players, two of whom are constantly copping grief from the third player for not ever doing anyhing on runs, not ever participating and basically copping an easy ride on his hard work.

So, players need to go into the twenty-somethingth floor of a building nominally owned by MCT but leased out to businesses, such as lawyers, accountants etc. In particular, they need to hook up a remote decking dohicky to a computer that contains information. Luckily, office with the computer in it is a window office. Unluckily, it's twenty-somethingth floor.

So, player one (the one who says he always does the work) suggests a 'brilliant' plan. It involves getting into a neighbouring, taller, less-secure building, going to the roof, sliding over on a rope, then doing the thing from that Entrapment movie (telescoping bolts remove the window pane), getting in and attaching the thingy to the computer whatsit.

Unfortunately, this is a useless group. They think they aren't, but they are. Not a smidgin of Electronic skill amongst them. So they decide to hire a specialist electronics guy to do the disarming of security systems and the attaching of the thing to the whatsit. Normally, I get pissed off in multi-player games with players subcontracting, but in this case I don't care.

Player one says he's not going into the building, he'll 'stand watch' on the taller building. He then changes his mind to 'standing watch' in the car ready to drive off. Player two says he'll go into the building with the security guy because, well, player one has hit a sore spot with his suggestion that player two is a lazy b*stard. Player three (shaman) decides not to go in for whatever reason.

Player two and electornics guy breeze into the taller building because it's mostly empty as it's 3am and electronics guy actually knows what a security system is. They get to the top of the building. They're setting up and shaman suggests he'll just levitate them over to target building. They're pissed off because they could have just levitated up from the ground, but who cares.

They levitate over. They get into the building. The electronics guy attaches the thingy to the computer whatsit. Player two, sitting there thinking he really is a third wheel, says he'll help out and manages to set off an alarm. Swearing starts.

As an aside I have carefully explained that this is one of those buildings where the security response is over the top. If you set off an alarm, you're stuffed. If you're sneaky enough not to set off an alarm, you're OK.

So, astral mage turns up and beats the astral snot out of shaman, who drops unconcscious. Player one, in the car downstairs, says he'll hang around to wait for electronics guy and player two. With no levitating, electronics guy sets up a rope with his grappel gun and starts rapelling down to ground. He promptly dies because a drone kills him (it's up above them).

Player two says he'll low-altitude parachute his way out. He has a skill of four. His target is about fifteen because of all sorts of modifiers. He moans about his background being in the military and he should be able to parachute (despite logical argument about how it's pretty difficult to low-altitude parachute), but decides he'll fast rope down.

Player two announces he'll swing out the window and fast rope to the ground. He calls for a target number, and is told it's about twelve. He then announces he doesn't have an Athletics skill but he should be fine with pool. I advise him he doesn't get pool if he wants to default to an attribute, which he does (he's an ork).

Player two tries, fails, karma pool, fails. Invokes hand of god.

I invent that he's fallen after missing the rope, but gets tangled in the rope by his foot. The rope catches or tangles or something and he stops falling just shy of the ground, but the horrendous wrenching tearing force on his leg rips it clean off. He lands on what's left of the electronics guy, and goes into shock (deadly wound).

Player oe thinks very, very carefully about whether he actually wants to come back and save this guy's life.

The players were hired to extract a lawyer type feller, and for whatever reason (This was at least 13 years ago now.) I had mapped the room out, that they ended up in, as having a twelve foot thick marble ceiling. I take great care to describe this to them at several points during the game.

When they get to said room a struggle breaks out, in which three of the four players are fighting with the suits security team. The fourth player who sat looking confused for a second finally announced on his turn that he was going to take his grenade launcher, and aim at the ceiling and fire a single frag grenade.

We all literally stopped what we were doing and looked at him, completely flabbergasted. Finally the silence was broke by the furious howls of the other players asking him what the hell he was doing. He waited until the protsts died down, grabbed his dice and rolled. I sat stunned the whole time. He then spent a point of karma, and rerolled his failures.

End result? Chunky salsa. 3 dead players(Mr. Grenade Launcher died.), 1 player dying nearly dead, their target pasted to the walls and floor, and a dead security contingent. I almost stopped the game at that point, but I allowed the remaining player to burn some karma, rewind time and stop Mr. I Shoot the Ceiling with Grenade Launcher from making the bad choice.

off topic sorry

12 foot thick marble ceiling?? dont you mean a marble ceiling twelve feet up?

On topic.

Ok my group was heading into the ork underground (I think that is the name) we were told this is a very dangerous place, expect trouble. So my mage brought two extra clips for his preditor, added a securetech jacket to his armor, and was all ready to try out his brand new spell. One Sam put on a little more armor and brought his SMG and plenty of spare bullets. One sam brought his normal loadout and some assorted gernades (I think two of everything you can buy) and the other sam decided he needed a gernade launcher. Fine, some extra fire power would be helpful

At one point our negoations with a gang of orks goes bad, and the sam with the gernades decides to toss a white phosperous gernade up into a walkway above us. Now the occupants of said walkway decide to simply kick the gernade back down on us.

Roll scatter, it hits the sam with the gernade launcher. now the GM rules that the white phosperous that is burning the sam could cook of the gernades, he rolls and yes it does. He ask the sam's player how many gernades he has. The player resopndes that he has five, five clips of 20 (or something like that) The GM asks to see his charictor sheet, and notices that he is carrying around 10 or 20 pounds or so of high explosives in adition to the gernades in his backpack.

At this point the gm rules that the explosion is so large that it kills us, the orks, and a gass main that causes a block of the city to colaps in, destroying severel Starbucks'.

And now for some strange reason, I am scarred when other players start talking of heavy weapons.

You don't take a weapon that was used against you and throw it in the smelter just because it did damage to you. If it's a good weapon, you pick it up and use it when you need it.

Personally, I think the corps are far less likely to track down and kill a runner team that can pull off a decent job. Why would they kill them? They can just hire them to do the same stuff to their opponents. I mean, if they're good enough to do it to me, then they should be good enough to do it to my chief rival, shouldn't they?

I can see corps hunting down and killing runners that know stuff they shouldn't, but just for running against the corp? Nah.

Crime syndicates and so on? That's different. Pride issues, reputation issues.. and even then, I can see the runners being given the choice of work for them or be sold to organ clinics and street docs in pieces -- depending on how public the incident was.

I would expect the corp to file some paperwork requesting the extradition of the troll to there lands for trial and punishment. His face will be added to those the face scanning systems at government buildings and airports and should he show up in such a location before having cosmetic surgery he will be arrested and deported. The others will make the same lists but without an image the astral signature will not likely be tracked thay should be OK

That response would be best for the bottom line of the corp, given the extreme violence used loan star will want rid of the troll but won’t mount a man hunt.

If the troll’s life is being made difficult they may at some point in the future offer to drop the extradition request in exchange for a job being done

Edward

i ment law inffocment.

sory

Edward

Edward, no offense meant, but everytime I see your name I expect to see Cowboy Bebop references. Ed being my fav character aside from Ein.

It seems like everyone has a story about how the misuse of explosives often leads to PC death. This seems especially true of grenade launchers. About 10 years ago, while I was a college student, I read an article about grenade launchers and how they have been engineered to prevent soldiers from accidentally killing themselves. Being an engineer, I was naturally interested and that kernel of knowledge has remained in my head for all this time.

Bear in mind that this information is about 10 years old and may only apply to one type of grenade launcher or perhaps only American made grenade launchers or whatever. As they say YMMV. Launched grenades have spin fuzes inside that don’t arm the grenade until it has traveled a certain minimum distance. The grenade leaves the barrel of the launcher and is spinning at a certain rate, say X revolutions per second. It’s also traveling forward at a certain rate, say Y meters per second. So it’s an easy matter to divide X by Y to get how many revolutions the grenade will spin for each meter it travels forward. The spin fuze works in such a way as to arm the grenade when it has made so many revolutions and the engineers who designed the grenade worked it out so that this would be a minimum distance, say about 5 meters. 5 meters is the minimum distance for all grenade launchers in Shadowrun and in my games, a launched grenade that impacts short of that distance hasn’t armed itself yet

So say a soldier is carrying a grenade launcher and accidentally discharges it at the ground at his feet, into the ceiling overhead or inside an APC. The grenade would only travel a meter or two and so won’t be armed when it hits the ground, ceiling or wall of the APC and so shouldn’t detonate. However, a launched grenade is still a really big bullet moving really fast. It may still pulp one or two people as it ricochets around before coming to rest. That kind of thing makes the accident prone soldier the least popular guy in his squad instead of the least popular dead guy at a mass funeral.


Now, my own dumb group story. My group did a Shadowrun a few weeks ago in which our decker, a hermetic mage and a face/sniper/whatever guy went into a building, stole some data and got away clean. Since they went in with a fake ID and corporate suits, no one was disguised and no one wore masks. They didn’t do anything stupid, or fired a shot or brandished a weapon, so they figured that their being on camera within the building was no big deal. They figured that the camera’s memory was probably on some sort of loop and would be over-written within a few days anyway. Fortunately, my character was out (I had to skip that game session for a family thing).

So about a week later, our decker is contacted with a e-mail that had a video clip of him, the mage and the sniper/face/whatever guy inside the building. The e-mail says something like, ‘We know what you did and we have proof. Retrieve the data for us or we’ll give this information to the cops and you’ll go to jail.’ The decker met them in a virtual meeting and said something like ‘we don’t like to be blackmailed. We’ll happily work for you to steal the data back again, but we’re not doing it for free.’ The bad guys say, ‘so be it’ and they leave.

We figure that we’re screwed and we can either skip town for a few weeks or do something proactive. Naturally, we decided to do the proactive. We decided to kidnap the corporate president (it was a small corporation with less than 100 employees so kidnapping him was not completely outside the realm of possibility) knock him around a bit and warn him that if he messes with us we’ll mess with him personally. We managed to snatch the President and kill his driver and his bodyguard. We’re heading out towards the barrens when we notice a Doc Wagon Osprey following us. We had completely forgotten to check him for a Doc Wagon phone/biomonitor thing! We check and sure enough, he has a platinum account with free high threat response and all that jazz.

So last week we played the big confrontation against Doc Wagon. Bottom line, we managed to kill about half the Doc Wagon team and damage one drone. Our team’s two MPUVs were destroyed and we lost some gear. Fortunately, Doc Wagon was more interested in getting the guy back alive and left us alone once they had him safe. We now have the same problem we had the week before, except we’re out two expensive vehicles, a lot of ammo, some of our gear and, oh yeah, now some of us are wounded. Not our finest hour.

Was teh guy hurt at all? Cause they don't like to respond to false calls. And yes, saving your hoop from a kidnapping is considered a false call. They'd probably see his life signs are fine, leave and call Lone Star

Yeah, they dropped a concussion grenade into the backseat of the limo in order to incapacitate his bodyguard. Did a number on the victim as well. That kind of trauma is enough to set off the Doc Wagon biomonitor.

Oh, well then well played by the GM.

I've read, heard, experienced some things that have been referred to as player sillyness when it was the GM that was being silly.

Another possible bone-head with that last one - at any point did your team determine that the people who contacted the decker with the blackmail threat were actually part of the corporation that they hit? Misinformation can be a real bitch...

To answer Pete's question, yeah we thought of that after the fact. We figured that it was either the corporation, an individual within the corporation who was working independently or someone else who had an interest. At this point, I'm not sure I care.

To DocMartand, what happened was we used explosives on the limo's passenger side window to bust open the bullet proof glass. Then someone tossed in a concussion grenade. The bodyguard opened the opposite side door and hustled the corporate president out of the car double quick. The grenade went off but it was mostly contained by the body of the limo. I think the president and the bodyguard both caught some of the blast, but not so bad as to be pureed into baby food. To be honest, I believe that what set off the Doc Wagon alarm was a kick to the president's head delivered by our team's infiltration specialist. In any case, he had 10 points of stun and was probably in a serious state of shock. I have no problem with that kind of thing setting off the biomonitor.

Can you give me a rules reminder on that concussion grenade thing? I was under theimpression a blast in a confined space only upped the power, not the damage level. Am I missing the relevant section somewhere?

Right, I knew I had to be missing something. Okay, without the optional rules, it's just a nasty moderate stun wound. With the optional rules (that actually make sense for any such blast) then anybody in the car is pulped.

I'd imagine the car lacks the barrier rating to stand up to more than one bounce off any wall, though.

Were the limo windows bulletproof? If not, the concussive force coulda shattered them and let itself out. The salsa wouldn't be as chunky.

True! The glass would need a barrier rating of 5 (assuming the grenade detonates in the center of the cabin) or 6 (if the grenade was against a side). Ballistic glass is a 4, Armored glass is an 8. For a normal car, a 3 or 4 is reasonable. (It's tougher than standard window glass 2). If the car has armor, a 5 or 6 is not unreasonable.

Assuming the windows blow out, there would only be blast from top to bottom.
12
(+11+10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1)*2
=144
144D stun +~34 extra successes.
Only 17 physical boxes filled. Much more reasonable.

If the roof blew off too
12+11
23D stun +1 box physical. Piece of cake!

With the armoured glass it may well blow out the windows after the 2nd or 3rd rebound.

Of cause a concussion grenade cant hurt objects (I would say unless it stages up beyond deadly stun) so it remains to be seen wether or not the windows will blow at all.

As to the grenade timing issue, SR grenades have variably timed fuses and allow the user to quickly change the fuse times, also apparently they don’t stop spinning on impact so a ricochet may detonate after bouncing back to you.

It dos seem strange when firing a grenade without a grenade link 7m in front of you in a clear field without a grenade link and achieving a success on the attack roll the grenade can detonate 2m behind you.

Edward

The way I understand the rules to read, if the barrier can withstand the first shock wave, it can withstand the reverberations. No that it's common sense. It would make sense to only ramp up the damage to twice the barrier rating. Of course when that 12M shock wave comes at you from 6 directions....

Yes, Edward, good to catch that chunky salsa comment. I understand Smiley to mean less salsay...salsalicous...salsacidity...salsaous... damaging. Now I see why he just said less chunky.